We are very enthusiastic about the direction of our program for the coming 2014-15 academic year. The Antiracism Inc. program series will feature the subheading “Intersections.” Our goal is to engage students, scholars, and activists in a discussion that develops our understanding about racism and sexism in the present. How do ‘colorblindness’ and ‘gender-blindness’ work together, for example? How do we develop language, images, and imaginaries that create radical possibilities as we expose racial and gendered power? We hope to maintain critical attention to questions of gender and sexuality as we build our analyses of the incorporation of antiracist discourses.

Spring Quarter 2015

Antiracism Inc./Works/Intersections/Transformations

We are excited to have your participation at the final event for this round of the Antiracism Inc. program series, where we will come together in a space of solidarity, creativity, collaboration, and community building to reflect on the ongoing strife in Baltimore, which speaks to a long history of race-based state violence in the United States that has not disappeared despite official antiracist discourses to the contrary. We hope to consider how the conversations that have taken place throughout the Antiracism Inc. program about racism, antiracism, activism, institutional power, violence, and the intersections among race, gender, and sexuality may come together to help us heal and build coalitions of solidarity.

The event will take place on Thursday, May 14, 2015 from 12-2 p.m. in the MultiCultural Center Lounge on the UCSB campus. Please see below for a flyer with more details about the event.

How do we negotiate the relationship between the dominant demand for 'colorblindness' regrading race and the demand for 'hypervisibility' regarding gender and sexuality? "Critical Conversations" will address the intersections of those subjects, practices, and positionalities that defy incorporation. Please join us in this dialogue about race and sexuality in a series of lively discussions on Thursday March 12, 2015 from 10:00 am to 5:30 pm in the MultiCultural Center Lounge.

Fall Quarter 2014

Antisexism U.: An Encounter with Dr. Nick Mitchell

Please join us for the first event of the year, Antisexism U. Dr. Nick Mitchell (Ethnic Studies, UC Riverside) will lead us in a discussion of the institutional histories of Women’s Studies and Black Studies.

The event will take place on Thursday October 30, 2014 in South Hall 2635 from 2:00-4:00 pm. Afternoon tea and cookies will be provided.

Please email Professor Felice Blake at fblake@english.ucsb.edu or Roberta Wolfson at acgc.grad@gmail.com for PDF copies of these readings.

2013-2014

Welcome back! We are very enthusiastic about the direction of our program for the coming academic year. The Antiracism Inc. program series will feature the subheading “Antiracism Works.” We seek to extend the critical frames for addressing issues central to Antiracism Inc. by collaborating with community organizations. We seek to bridge intellectual work with community connection and engagement. Rather than hoarding intellectual goods, products, and services within the institution, we seek to build foundations for collective knowledge production across institutional divides. What frameworks and concepts do we need to critically and practically engage with ongoing movements for justice? What lines of flight, poetics of struggle, and radical imaginaries become possible through alternative modes for circulating and producing knowledge? While never minimizing the importance of examining the operation of institutional power, our questions look to the ways that power operates on the ground (broadly conceived) in the everyday. The program thus offers opportunities for engaging students, faculty, and community members, giving us coalitional work to do.

Also, thanks again to y'all who attended "Poetic Interventions" last spring, and we hope to have more folks at its next installment in February 2014. If you missed it, watch a video summary made by filmmaker Emanuel Garcia here.

Follow us on Twitter @acgcc

Live tweet events using the hashtag #AntiracismWorks

We would also like to thank the UC Humanities Research Institute for its support of our program this year!

Spring Quarter 2014

The American Cultures and Global Contexts Center is proud to present Antiracism Inc./Works: The Anticonference. Please join us on Friday and Saturday May 16-17 at the UCSB MultiCultural Center Lounge for the academic, artistic, and activist encounter that is sure to reinvigorate our analysis of and commitments to social justice. Our anticonference will involve the voices of faculty, organizers, students, and poets from across the country. Our conversation centers on the reading and redefinition of antiracism in the Age of Obama. We hope you'll join us to participate in generative dialogues with folks who've been part of the program since its inception, spanning the ACGCC reading and film series to Poetic Interventions last spring to the prison abolition work of the Coalition for Sustainable Communities.

Everyone is welcome - no registration required! You may stop by for any or all of the events. Please see more info and a full conference schedule below, and you may join the event on Facebook:

Winter Quarter 2014

Please join us for the second iteration of "Activist Encounters," which extends our conversation from Fall 2013 with the Shawn Greenwood Working Group and incredible undergraduate student activists. We are hosting a dialogue on stopping prison expansion in Santa Barbara County. We are delighted that Diana Zuñiga, Statewide Organizer from Citizens United For a Responsible Budget (CURB), will be joining us for the conversation. CURB is a statewide alliance of over 50 organizations working to curb prison spending by reducing the number of people in prison and the number of prisons in California. “Activist Encounters II” will offer both a critique of the structural conditions of mass incarceration and concrete strategies for stopping prison expansion. This will be our first organizing meeting to plan future community mobilizations around this pressing issue. As always, the event is free and open to the public. Lunch will be provided. Some more details are provided on the below flyer:

We at the ACGCC are excited to introduce our latest project: a drop-in writing lab for junior high and high school students, their families, SBCC students, and the greater Santa Barbara community! Please contact the Graduate Fellow, Alison, for more information or to get involved.

Fall Quarter 2013

Please join us for this incredible event at the UCSB MultiCultural Center:

On October 17, 2013, we will hold two related events: 1) a lunchtime meeting featuring a discussion with the Shawn Greenwood Working Group and 2) an afternoon forum about incarceration, drones, and detention with the SGWG, student activists, and academics. Both events are free and open to the public.

Event: Engaged Activism/Activist Encounters

Location: SH 2635

Date: Thursday October 17, 2013

Time: 12:30-1:45pm, 3-5pm

12:30-1:45pm – Talk by the Shawn Greenwood Working Group. More info and their Statement of Purpose can be found here.

3:00-5:00pm – Roundtable Discussion on activist responses to police murder, global security, drones, immigration, detention, occupation, incarceration, and other forms of state violence. We intend to foster dialogue and raise questions across racialized, gendered, and disciplinary divides with a common critique of the state to develop new frames for activism and coalition.

Wecome back to the ACGCC! The goal of the 2012-13 program, Antiracism Inc., is to consider the need to rethink the meaning of antiracism in light of contemporary shifts in global political discourses on race and racism. Current rhetoric on race purports to embrace principles of racial equality, anti-discrimination and multiculturalism; yet old and new forms of racial violence, exploitation and discrimination persist.

If publics are complicit in systemic forms of racism but believe themselves to be anti-racists, how do we re-imagine the meaning of antiracism? The ACGCC program will seek to map the ways these paradoxes manifest in the situated discourses and practices in various geopolitical spaces. We seek to engage with the transnational mediated complexities of contemporary race practice, and explore the opportunities these provide for rethinking antiracism in the twenty-first century.

Spring Quarter 2013

The ACGCC is excited to announce a special event of the program series Antiracism Inc., which contributes to broadening new political imaginative propositions for justice by giving us all something to think about and work to do. “Poetic Interventions” is a daylong poetry workshop open to all on Saturday May 11th, 2013 that seeks to engage the imagination, our collectivity, and unique perspectives to create new language and images that address the problems and possibilities our current racial landscape presents.

Please join us! Lunch will be provided, and all are welcome.

Winter Quarter 2013

Our winter quarter program for Antiracism Inc. features a film series. Each screening will be followed by a conversation led by a distinguished scholar whose expertise will lend additional insight to our ongoing dialogue.

The Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative and the American Cultures & Global Contexts Center have collaboratively organized a mini-conference on Friday, March 8, 2013 from 1-4pm in SH 1415:

Duplicitous Inclusions: Race and Subject of Nation
In performance, lived blackness as a subaltern location of national identity reveals and resists state and social processes of contradictory exclusion and hyper-visibility. It becomes a particular site for confronting incursions of insidious and overt marginalizations. In the research presented at Duplicitous Inclusions: Race and Subject of Nation, creative artists forge feeling and consciousness around racial exclusions that inconvenience and confound the national self-image in South Africa and the United States. The keynote addresses explore the terms of confronting racism in the face of the fantasy that it no longer exists. These scholars examine race and representation in the development of a seemingly new landscape of racial meaning and national knowledge.

This exciting event will feature two visiting scholars: Dr. Brandi Wilkins Catanese, Associate Professor of African American Studies & Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, and Dr. Xavier Livermon, Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Wayne State University. Through cross-disciplinary dialogue, we hope to engage questions central to the missions of both the ACGCC's Antiracism Inc. program and the Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative's focus on Race and Affect.

Please also join us for a follow-up discussion to our Fall Reading Series open to students, faculty, and community members. This special event on "Race & the Field of Literature" will be led by Dr. Felice Blake on Tuesday, February 26, 2013 from 12:30-1:45pm in the SRB Multipurpose Rm. Lunch will be provided.

Fall Quarter 2012

End of Quarter Open House and Reception

On behalf of Dr. Felice Blake I'm excited to invite you to an Open House and Reception this Friday to celebrate a wonderful quarter at the American Cultures & Global Contexts Center. We would like to thank everyone who participated in the Fall Reading Series of our 2012-2013 program, Antiracism Inc., for coming together to think through the meanings of antiracism in light of contemporary shifts in global political discourses on race and racism, and for collectively generating possibilities for justice. In case you weren't able to make the reading series or would like to learn more - you're just in luck! Amanda Phillips, an ACGCC affiliated graduate student, recently wrote a blog post about the program featured on HASTAC and the UC Humanities Forum, which you can read here:

So that we may show our appreciation and keep the conversations flowing, please do stop by the American Cultures & Global Contexts Center on Friday December 7th, from 4-6pm (South Hall 2710) for our Open House and Reception. Newcomers are also welcome - we have a lot to look forward to this winter quarter, which will feature a film series (as well as a fall reading series followup discussion led by Dr. Felice Blake) about which you can learn more during the event. Refreshments will be provided.

Hope to see you there!

Fall Reading Series

The Antiracism Inc. program for the 2012-2013 year will include a Fall quarter 2012 reading series open to undergraduate and graduate students, community members, staff, and faculty. For PDFs of the suggested readings please email the Graduate Student Fellow, Alison Reed (at acgc.grad@gmail.com).

Spring Quarter 2012

Join us this spring for continued discussions on risk, uncertainty, and security at the Critical Issues in American program on "Speculative Futures." Upcoming events feature symposia on cybersecurity and speculative media, along with a graduate conference on contagion/control. Be sure to check back frequently for event updates!

The "Risk Society Series" is in full swing this quarter and features several exciting events, many related to the Critical Issues of America program on “Speculative Futures.” This quarter's events will culminate in the Santa Barbara Global Studies conference, which bring dynamic junior scholars together with established senior scholars in various fields around the issue of "Crisis." Please check back for event information as they will be updated throughout the quarter!

*Risk Series*

Symposium II: Security and Catastrophe

Prof. Peter van Wyck, (Concordia University) "An Archive of Threat"

Prof. Andrew Lakoff, (USC) "Biopolitics in Real Time: The Actuary and the Sentinel in Global Health"

Jan. 13, 2012, McCune Conference Room, 6020 HSSB, 2–6 pm

*Risk Series*

Talk: Chris Mooney, "The Republican Brain on Science: Understanding Conservatives' Denial of Research Based Reality"

In the second event for this film and discussion series, we will be looking at the Dark Winter exercises, and using them to frame a screening and discussion of Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later. We will also be looking at an excerpt of Priscilla Wald's Contagious (please contact the ACGC Fellow for copies).

This public health and security engagement is co-sponsored by the Transcriptions Center and COMMA.

ACGCC co-sponsored eventCaribbean Crossroads Conference

Feb.
21-22, 2012, McCune Conference Center

This conference explores the interactions and points of contact between the different cultural and linguistic zones that make up the Caribbean region, in support of a less insular, more archipelagic sense of Caribbean culture.

The University of California, Santa Barbara is holding an interdisciplinary global studies conference on a wide range of topics for scholars, both established and in the graduate stage, from the West Coast and beyond, under the general theme of crisis as salient feature of current global conditions. Crisis may thus be understood at every level, from the economic and financial to the environmental to problems of legitimacy and human security, to name a few.

The focal theme of the ACGCC “Risk Society Series” this year is “uncertainty.” Classically uncertainty, the pathologized other of calculable risk, is precisely the terrifying face of a dynamic, unpredictable system of emergences. As a “condition,” it gains prominence at moments of crisis, amid spectacular financial crashes, environmental debacles, biological insecurity, and insurgent attacks; its social and psychological effects range from terror to precarity. More recently, risk theorists have argued uncertainty arises from a dynamic but constantly generative system whose potentialities are foreclosed by the risk calculus. Given the ensuing debate, perhaps it is time to revisit the risk-uncertainty dialectic.

The ACGCC participates a campus-wide dialogue on risk-uncertainty. The center will cosponsor several events hosted by the Critical Issues of America program on “Speculative Futures.” The calendar below includes these events (marked as “Risk Series”) as well as other fall quarter talks, lectures, discussions, and films relevant to the focal theme.

For updated information on ACGCC and related events, make sure to bookmark the ACGCC calendar.

ACGCC co-sponsors an East Asia Center Event

Prof. Pheng Cheah (UC Berkeley) Lecture: "Entering the World from an Oblique Angle: On Jia Zhangke as an Organic Intellectual"

Thursday, Oct. 6th at 6pm, 2252 HSSB

*Risk Series*
UCSB Arts & Lectures Hosts

Daniel Yergin (author of The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power) Lecture: "The Quest--Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World"

As a founding member of the editorial team of the Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS), Martinsen will discuss how this online journal was formed and provide a glimpse behind the scenes to see how JTAS functions as an open-access forum for Americanists in the global academic community. In addition, this talk will explore some of the creative possibilities and resources for digital publishing, particularly for groups of students and scholars on a limited budget.

Eric Martinsen is assistant professor of English at Ventura College. In 2010, he completed his doctorate on "Global Moments: Spectatorship, Violence and Urbanization in Contemporary Fiction and Film” at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Please join us in this talk by a former ACGCC Fellow and UCSB alum!

Undergraduate Panel

"Special Topics in Research: American Literature, Global Literature and the ACGCC."

Thursday, May 12th, from 2-3pm in the ACGC Center

Yanoula Athanassakis, Anne Cong-Huyen, Ryan Stodtmeister, and Sharon Tang Quan will be present to talk about their work, to hear about yours, and to answer your questions about what's new, hot, and exciting in the fields of American and Global literatures; we'll all also look forward to hearing about your research interests and your thoughts about the field. Food and beverages provided.